Hi Everyone, Happy belated New Year, and I hope everyone had wonderful holidays.

Geoff here, and I want to thank every one of you for your patience. Yes, we are still here and still intend to continue the comic. Hot Mess remains a passion project for all of us. We’ve had a rough couple of months with personal obligations and holidays – not an excuse, just the reason why we’ve been so slow in getting back up to speed. What we’re now doing is stock-piling a large handful of strips so that we can run them without interruption.

I’ll ask for just a little more patience in this process and hope you all check out the new strips when they’re up.

For our fans in the U.S., Happy Thanksgiving!! And instead of our usual holiday card-style post, we’ve got a regular strip… and it’s about food (kind of). It’s more about the crazy amount of crap in our prepared foods.

I had wanted to find a way to comment on the menu stats restaurants are now required to post ever since they started doing it, when I noticed that my favorite dish at an eatery that shall remain nameless – a dish which I thought was at least relatively healthy – was chock full of insanely bad ingredients and way over-the-top when it came its nutritional deficiencies. Needless to say, I never looked at salad the same way again.

Hi Hot Mess fans. I don’t know how many of you are comic fans in general, but if you are, I’m sure you’ve heard of the controversy created by one of the writer/artists who helped shape the creative direction of an entire generation of mainstream and indie books, Frank Miller. Basically, he rails against the Occupy Wall Street movement, and conflates their efforts with helping terrorists. I would link to it, but it is fairly offensive, so I’m sure you will have no problem finding it on Google if you’d like to seek it out.

Now, politics aside, I don’t think his rant has much coherence as an argument. He makes a lot of logic leaps in order to link protesters to terrorists, and takes certain big things for granted which I think are factually incorrect. Perhaps if someone set down with him he could explain his thought process beat by beat and how everything he mentions is linked together, but we’ll probably never get that chance.

The response from the comic community has been mostly negative toward Frank’s views, and our friends over at The Webcomic Factory have made a comic that’s been getting a lot of attention… so I just had to share.

I feel so stupid now when I think back to the times I used to go out with a large group of people, and I was always so nervous, especially if it was with people I didn’t hang out with very often. “Is what I’m ordering cool?” Really? Did I really ask myself that? Yes, I did. So lame of me. This was long before I really knew who I was, and wow am I glad I figured that out.

We’re at the three-quarter-century mark! And how perfect is it that during Halloween week, we get to post this very special #75 strip? Our first look into the mind of someone else in the series, and it’s very, very bleak. Can you guess which animals in Anna’s head parallel with those we see from our Bethhy?